It’s well-known by now that the move from print to the internet hasn’t been an easy one for the news industry, but Dutch publication De Nieuwe Pers has found a great way to use this new medium – users can pay either €4.49 a month for access to the entire newspaper, or €1.79 to subscribe to individual columnists.
This is a very clever way to mesh the old, monolithic approach of the newspaper with the new, personal touch of blogs. The reach and real-time connectivity of the internet has allowed journalists to cultivate far closer relationships with their readers than was ever possible before.
That closer bond and back-and-forth conversation has led to a certain “stardom” among niche journalists, where people seek and follow the individual rather than their mother publication. Nieuwe Pers has acknowledged this with its new pricing model, effectively creating a “co-op” of semi-autonomous journalists.
Of course this only really lends itself to opinion or investigative journalism, something where the author’s input can shine through, as opposed to vanilla newsfeeds – but the newsfeed model is basically dead already, gutted by free, advertising-driven sources.
That means Nieuwe Pers’ approach wouldn’t work for every newspaper, at least not the very large ones that are mostly feed-sourced content peppered with a few longer-form columns. It isn’t a magic bullet for the news industry, but for smaller, niche publications, it’s a business model that I think holds great promise (if it’s shown to be financially viable, of course). I wish them the best of luck.